SOURCE: Cro, Stelia. “The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom.” In The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom, pp. 131-57. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Cro argues that, to Rousseau, the idea of the Noble Savage spoke to the principles of physical and moral freedom.]

THE NOBLE SAVAGE AS COMMONPLACE

By the middle of the eighteenth century the exoticism of the voyagers, who for over two centuries had proclaimed the natural goodness of the savages of America and the islands of the south seas, not only had inspired authors to write idealized accounts of the discovery and conquest of the New World, such as Marmontel's Les Incas, but it had inspired a radical new philosophy. In the words of Gilbert Chinard:

Ancient times had the Golden Age, the Middle Ages had the Terrestrial Paradise; at the time when the ancient myths were dead, or religion is buried by the attacks of the spirit of free inquiry, an ideal more updated, if I can say, certainly contemporary and at the same time exotic, has taken their place. The noble savage seems to incarnate all the ancient and Christian virtues, his dream comes from America and the Islands and from the accounts of the travellers come directly all the numerous utopias which appear before Rousseau, and which served as Rousseau's inspiration … The climax of that movement is marked by the Discourse on Inequality, the result of two and a half centuries of discussions, rebellions and utopistics dreams.¹

After the success of the Arlequin sauvage by Louis François de la Drevetière Delisle, performed for the first time by the company of the Theâtre des Italiens on June 17, 1721, the people of Paris could applaud the “Indien philosophe” in theatres throughout the city. It is not without sociological significance that the same people who during the day actively participated in the flourishing business of the “Compagnie du Mississipi,” the object of which was eventually to separate the virtuous Americans from their natural innocence, in the evening filled the Théâtre des Italiens in order to applaud their favourite hero, be it Delisle's Arlequin sauvage or Marmontel's Le Huron, presented for the first time on August 20, 1768 by the Comédiens Italiens.

Jacques Rousseau was witness to the success of the Arlequin sauvage. In his letter to d'Alembert “sur les spectacles,” he attributes its success to a view of nature which is always original and captivating. Referring to the success of the play, he writes: “[Its success] did not come from the partiality the spectators showed for the simplicity of that character since only one among them would want perhaps to imitate him. That play encourages quite a different view among them, which is to search and love new and unusual ideas; and no idea is so new for them that those which concern nature.”² Chinard has already observed that although these theatrical pieces did not deeply influence Rousseau's ideas as expressed in the Discourse sur l'inégalité and in the Contract social, nevertheless they did prepare the public to receive those ideas: “… it is almost certain that it would not have been received in such a way by its readers if the latter had not been already familiar with these new and unusual ideas.”³

Even a ballet such as Indes galantes, represented for the first time at the Royal Academy of Music in 1735, became so popular that it remained in the repertoire throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century.

The general philosophical tenor of these works was pretty uniform. A typical example of this kind of theatre is Marmontel's Le Huron. Rousseau's revolutionary symbol often lapsed into commonplace, as one can see in Marmontel's Le Huron in which the author tries to fit Voltaire's Ingénu with a happy ending of intended Rousseauian flavour or parody. The references to Canada's natural law of freedom, the easy criticism of the cruelty of society versus the generosity of nature are all intentional references to Rousseau's noble savage as perceived in A Discourse on Inequality, The Social Contract and Emile. The scene is a square in a French village. One of the two characters in the first scene, Mlle de Kerkabon, says that she had a brother in Canada and that both he and his wife died there very young. She and Mlle de St. Yves talk about a “sauvage.”

Mlle de St. Yves is engaged to the son of the “Bailli,” a young man with no charm to speak of, obnoxious and pretentious, who thinks that, because his father is a magistrate, he can get what he wants, even a wife. Mlle de Kerkabon praises the Huron in order to obtain some confidence from Mlle de St. Yves, because she knows that the latter is unhappy with the engagement, which has been prearranged by her parents without her knowledge or consent.

The Huron is a great hunter; his agility, strength and speed are celebrated by the following “arietta”:

How he goes! How he pursues! What a hunter is that Huron! One must see him in those valleys: he has wings on his feet. He shoots and “Bang, bang, bang,” does not miss one shot. Poor rabbits, they all go crazy. There is no faking or quick turning, nothing escapes him: he follows all their turns and deviations. What a runner! I cannot tell you what a good shot he is! “Bang, bang, bang,” he kills with every shot. In one breath he runs through the plain, without ever being tired. He is always alert, never deceived, or I do not know my name. Either running, flying or one hundred yards away; he shoots and the game is on the ground, How he goes, etc.⁴

Gilotin, the fiancé of Mlle de St. Yves, announces that the wedding is all set, but Mlle de St. Yves is not agreeable; she tells Gilotin that she does not love him. In the ensuing “arietta” Gilotin muses that sooner or later Mlle de St. Yves will come to love him, whereas Mlle de St. Yves repeats that she does not love him and never will: “One must first have the heart if one is to win the hand.”⁵

The Huron arrives with his game, including a rabbit which terrorizes Gilotin. This is the cause of comical remarks at the expense of Gilotin, who is ridiculed. Soon the attention turns to the Huron who has travelled to France from Canada all by himself. In answer to a question of Mlle de Kerkabon as to how can he manage all alone, he replies, echoing Rousseau's theory on the noble savage: “At my age a Huron is self-sufficient; / And thanks to nature, my needs are all satisfied.”⁶ Then, looking at Mlle de St. Yves, he assures her how easy it would be in Canada for two young persons to fall in love, borrowing again from Rousseau: “If you knew how obedient is your sex / and how ours is made gentle in order to satisfy love / Alas! If in our forests, where nature is queen, / I had found what I find here / I can assure you that I would still be there.”⁷

Thanks to a portrait that the Huron has had for as long as he has lived, Mlle de Kerkabon recognizes him as the son of her brother. The Huron is her nephew. She then suggests that, as a Frenchman, he ought to dress “à la française.” At first the Huron refuses on the ground that he is born free (“je suis libre”), but when Mlle de St. Yves asks him to do it for her sake he agrees.

Mlle de Kerkabon promises to speak to Mlle de St. Yves' father to try to change his mind about the wedding with Gilotin. Thanks to her intervention Mlle de St. Yves and the Huron confide their feelings for each other and decide to get married. An army officer calls the young men of the village into the army. Gilotin is terrified and is dismissed. In his place the officer enlists the Huron. Thus ends the first act of the comedy.

In the second and final act Mlle de St. Yves is worried about her Huron. She does not know whether he is still alive. But the Huron returns like a hero. Mlle de St. Yves' father agrees to their marriage, but later, fearful of Gilotin's father, a magistrate and an aristocrat, orders the Huron out of his house and sends his daughter to a convent. In the ensuing “arietta” the Huron, again borrowing from Rousseau, criticizes European hypocrisy: “It is you who are cruel, you and your laws, / It is you who should be called savages.”⁸ He decides to kidnap Mlle de St. Yves from the convent and is arrested, but an army officer intercedes on his behalf. Mlle de St. Yves' father forgives him and allows the wedding to take place.

On January 27, 1736 Voltaire's tragedy Alzire was staged for the first time. It had twenty performances, two of which were held at the Court, an exceptional success for the time. Voltaire shares the general perception of his time concerning the noble savage. Alzire's plot is based on the Incas, victims of the Spanish Inquisition. Voltaire follows Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca's Comentarios Reales and Las Casas' ideas on the mistreatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. In fact he has two characters, Alvarez and his son Gusman, incarnate the two opposing ideologies of Las Casas and Sepúlveda in the sixteenth century. At the opening of the play the two characters argue about the best form of government for the Indians. Gusman believes that the savages are nothing more than animals, while his father, aware of the courage, loyalty, intelligence and the generosity of the peoples under his jurisdiction, pleads with him, and urges him to be prudent and mild when he inherits the government of the Indians. But Gusman is unimpressed: “The ferocious American is a wild beast / Who bites and shakes the chain of his slavery; / Submissive when he is punished, be becomes rebellious when he is forgiven, / He thinks he is feared by the one who praises him.”⁹ Alvarez answers: “The American, ferocious because of his simplicity, / Is as courageous as we are and is better than we are.”¹⁰

The noble savage is Zamore, an Indian who, having seen his fiancée Alzire in the hands of his enemy and the destruction of his country, refuses to convert to Christianity, seeing that those who preach it do not practise it. He murders his rival Gusman who, in the meanwhile, has married Alzire, a marriage to which she has agreed in the hope of saving her country. The moribund Gusman forgives Zamore and returns Alzire to him. His last words convey the edifying purpose Voltaire had when he wrote this tragedy: “Montèze, Americans, who were my victims, / Be aware that my clemency is greater than my crimes. / Educate America; teach to her kings / That the Christians are born to give them laws. / (To Zamore) Our gods know the difference: / Yours have ordered you death and vengeance; / Mine, when your hand is murdering me, / Order me to pity you and to forgive you.”¹¹

It was not the intention of the tragedy to proclaim the state of nature, but the state of law: the tolerance and mildness which, as Alvarez had recommended at the beginning of the play, will eventually bring civilization to the Indians. Christianity here is not so much a revealed truth as it is a component of law and order in line with the secular ideal of the French monarchy. Voltaire, contrary to the predecessors of Rousseau, does not share their admiration for the savage in the state of nature, nor for their communism, their absence of laws, their rudimentary and primitive life. It is not the Europeans who must revert to the state of nature, but it is they who must bring, gradually and moderately, the laws of western civilization to America.

ROUSSEAU AND VOLTAIRE: PRIMITIVE MAN AND CIVILIZED SAVAGE

Voltaire's noble savage becomes a propaganda tool of French absolutism against Spanish absolutism, an example of how the Black Legend was used against the Spanish Empire. Before 1789 the Spanish “Ilustrados” will accept Voltaire's view because it identifies a scapegoat: the Catholic Church and the Jesuit Order. Thus the “Ilustrados” can carry on their reforms and appear as true revolutionaries without threatening the establishment. But after 1789, when Voltaire's noble savage is replaced by Rousseau's allegory of freedom, Absolutism becomes the target of the Revolution. The scope of the reforms cannot be limited to the Catholic Church or to the Jesuit Order. They now are pointing straight at the absolutist monarchs of Europe. Through a process of self destruction the civilized savage of Voltaire, and of countless works by many other contemporaries, has become the primitive man of Rousseau, demanding freedom, equality and brotherhood as the sole true tenets of a new social contract. Voltaire's savage is a commonplace, whereas that of Rousseau represents a political alternative. Lichtenberger has explained how the cultural climate of Paris was receptive to the moral and social criticism of the noble savage: “Nouveau Gulliver's savage and the Savage Arlequin of Deslisle are examples of man in the state of nature who, while less refined than the Europeans, deserves more than they do and, because of his simplicity and good sense conquers his reasons while he criticizes society, its laws and customs. Around these works therefore we have already a considerable literary output in which the savage is opposed to civilized man, his simple virtues to our complicated vices.”¹²

This criticism cleared the way for, but did not approximate Rousseau's allegory. As long as the criticism of the noble savage does not attack the political establishment, it is tolerated. That was the purpose of Voltaire, to make of the noble savage a symbol of the tolerance of French Absolutism compared to the intolerance denounced in his attacks against the Spanish Empire and the Jesuit Order. The libertines of the seventeenth century had already used the chronicles of the New World in order to demolish tradition. But while Voltaire shared these ideas, he never dreamed that they would lead to revolution and the destruction of the Absolutist system he believed vital to his concept of reform.¹³

Van den Heuvel has studied the circumstances surrounding the composition of L'Ingénu: the success of Saivigny's Illinois, a piece which had been presented at the Theatre français in Paris in May, 1767, and had supplanted Voltaire's own drama, Scythes, which had been presented in March of the same year, in the same theatre, but with much less success. Van den Heuvel has also indicated that in the preface to Scythes the author had anticipated the subject matter of the Ingenu: “It is the state of nature opposed in a certain way to the artificial man, as one finds it in the large cities.”¹⁴ It is also possible that this work was conceived in order to refute the ideas of Rousseau.¹⁵

Voltaire's dislike and misunderstanding of Rousseau's noble savage are well known. In a dialogue, “Entretiens d'un sauvage et d'un bachelier,” the scholar asks the savage whether it is true that the savages “spend their lives alone” and whether it is true that society is “an artificial degeneration” of that original loneliness.¹⁶ Voltaire's savage is an aristocrat, the ideal philosophe, without the vices of civilized man: superstition, intolerance, dogmatism, maliciousness, pedantism, arrogance and empty wit. His hedonistic philosophy is well expressed by the “sauvage” of the same dialogue: “it seems to me that that which gives us pleasure and harms no one is very good and proper; that that which harms mankind without pleasure is abominable; and that that which gives us pleasure while harming others is good for us for the moment, however it is very dangerous for ourselves and bad for others.”¹⁷

The Huron behaves like such an aristocrat. His actions are always reasonable and reveal his acceptance of the establishment, even if he has to denounce the vices of that same system which he ultimately accepts: he fights and wins against the English army, the nation so admired by Voltaire but a traditional enemy of the French Absolutist regime. When they decide to baptize him he explains that in England one lives as he pleases.¹⁸ He has read Shakespeare but not the Bible (p. 230). When he reads it he learns it by heart and wishes to be circumcised, but refuses confession, arguing that no apostle ever confessed his sins.

However the Huron also has an anti-Rousseauian message. Baptized with the name of Hercules, which alludes to the fifty virgins he changed into women in one single night, the Huron wishes to marry Mlle de St. Yves and, one morning breaks into her bedroom and assaults her in her own bed, protesting that this is only natural. The relatives and friends of the screaming young lady arrive in time to restrain the Huron from carrying out his plan. He protests that natural law is on his side, but they object to him that one must observe positive law which “should always prevail, since without the conventions conceived by men, natural law would be nothing more than natural pillage.”¹⁹ His next objection to positive law reminds us of the American chronicles, of Peter Martyr and Bembo and of Rousseau. When they tell him that in order to get married people need to have a priest, witnesses, contracts and licences, he replies: “You must be quite malicious if you need all these precautions.”²⁰

In spite of the tragedy of Mlle de St. Yves, seduced by a minister in order to obtain the release of her Huron, a seduction which takes her to an early grave, Voltaire allows for honest people to appreciate the Huron. After her death he becomes a great soldier, admired by all honest people for his courage and his wisdom. The lesson of the book seems resumed in the final words of the author: “How many honest people in the world can say unhappiness is good for nothing.”²¹ In other words, although there are corrupted people, the system is such that honesty, bravery and wisdom are appreciated. Therefore there is always hope, good people can and will find each other and appreciate each other, and unhappiness ought to be avoided, and will be avoided together with the disappearance of the Jesuits and all the monks, with the triumph of tolerance over superstition and of honesty over deception. It is a program of reform, not a revolution, that Voltaire is aiming at. As Redman puts it when he evaluates Voltaire's contribution to the French Revolution: “That Voltaire helped clear the ground for this cataclysmic event there can be no possible doubt; but it is erroneous to assume, as is often done, that he foresaw the Revolution or would have approved had he lived to witness it.”²²

In short, we could say that both Voltaire and Rousseau opposed the same foes: superstition, injustice, intolerance, Christianity; and admired freedom and justice. However the difference is that whereas Voltaire was convinced that only absolutist rulers could bring about the end of the Catholic Church in particular and of Christianity in general and put into place the necessary social and political reforms to make this a better world, a world where reason and science would guide mankind toward a utopian dream of happiness and intellectual fulfilment, Rousseau's republicanism aimed at the destruction of Absolutism and the advent of the religion of democracy, above and, if necessary, against the faith of reason. Here is where the two great men part. And here is where Rousseau's noble savage is more than a poetic metaphor. In The Discourse on Inequality he had stated inequivocally the interrelationship between social, moral and political action:

If we follow the progress of inequality in these different revolutions, we shall find that the establishment of law and the right of property was the first stage, the institution of magistrates the second, and the transformation of legitimacy into arbitrary power the third and last stage. Thus, the status of rich and poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of strong and weak by the second, and by the third that of master and slave, which is the last degree of inequality and the stage to which all the others finally lead until new revolutions dissolve the government altogether or bring it back to legitimacy.²³

In spite of the complexity of his philosophy and the intricate pattern of his ideas, Voltaire's Ingénu belongs to the commonplace noble savage, undoubtedly the highest and most artistic example of the genre, but still comprised and limited by the fashionable genre. Rousseau's primitivism achieved a new creation, capable of inspiring generations to come to search for a lost ideal within a new context: freedom, for its own sake, the unconditional pursuit of a free-thinking society, a freely adopted social contract which would enhance that noble savage ever present in every child. Voltaire cleared the ground so that Rousseau's noble savage could begin his new education as a child.

IN SEARCH OF A NEW ALLEGORIC MODE

In his Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité, Rousseau characterizes the state of nature of man as one “which no longer exists, which perhaps has never existed, which probably will never exist, but of which it is necessary to have exact notions in order to judge accurately our present state.”²⁴ It is a method of knowledge which is eminently non-rational, purely intuitive. How is it possible to have exact notions of something which might never have existed? The answer to this question is, in my opinion, also the reason for the originality of Rousseau: he is an intuitive thinker. One of the best examples of his method is his judgment on Machiavelli, an author he quoted several times in the Social Contract. The first quote occurs when Rousseau discusses religion as an instrument to found a state: “This is what in all times has forced the fathers of nations to have recourse to the intervention of heaven, and to give the gods credit for their own wisdom, to the end that the peoples, brought under the laws of the State as to those of nature, and recognizing the same power in the formation of man and in that of the city, obey with liberty and bear with docility the yoke of public felicity.”²⁵ In order to strengthen his argument that legislators have always claimed a divine origin for their legislation, Rousseau quotes from Machiavelli's Discourses on Titus Livy (I, 11): “‘And truly,’ says Machiavelli, ‘there never was any lawgiver among any people who did not have recourse to God, for otherwise his laws would not have been accepted, for many benefits are known to a prudent man who does not have reasons evident enough to enable him to persuade others’” (SC, 116, 40). In other words, Rousseau here follows Machiavelli who, according to Rousseau, interpreted the legislator's claim of the divine origin of the laws as the only means to convince the people to accept them for their own good, because “a prudent man” must use whatever means he can to consolidate the State. We are not far removed from the main thesis of The Prince. In fact, in Chapter VI, Of Monarchy, Rousseau makes another reference to Machiavelli and gives his original view of The Prince. The passage to which I refer is that in which Rousseau denies that rulers prefer to be loved, since they know that their subjects are loyal not out of love but out of weakness: “Their personal interest is first that the People be weak, miserable, and never able to resist them … It is this that Samuel strongly represented to the Hebrews; it is this that Machiavelli made evident. While feigning to give lessons to the kings he has given great ones to the peoples. The Prince of Machiavelli is the book of republicans” (SC, 212, 67-68). Here there are two different references to Machiavelli. The first is to a precise passage of The Prince, that in which Machiavelli discusses the nature of the ruler, and whether it is more effective for the ruler to be loved or feared by the people. Machiavelli concedes that it is theoretically better to be loved, but human nature being what it is, it becomes necessary for the ruler, if he wants to keep his dominion, to make the people obey his rule, if necessary by fear: “From this arises an argument: whether it is better to be loved than to be feared, or the contrary. I reply that one should like to be both one and the other; but since it is difficult to join them together, it is much safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.”²⁶ The second reference is a broad statement on the scope of The Prince and the intentions of Machiavelli. It is also a view which is central to my reading of Rousseau.

Here Rousseau states that one ought to read Machiavelli's masterpiece “allegorically,” that what he says and what he means are two different things. In fact, in order to strengthen his argument, in a fairly long note Rousseau makes a succinct and eloquent apology for the Florentine historian: “Machiavelli was an honest man and a good citizen; but, attached to the house of Medici, he was forced, during the oppression of his fatherland, to disguise his love for liberty. The mere choice of his execrable hero sufficiently manifests his secret intention; and the opposition of the maxims of his book The Prince and those of his Discourses on Titus Livy and his History of Florence shows that this profound political thinker has had until now only superficial or corrupt readers. The court of Rome has sternly prohibited his book; I certainly believe it: it is that court which he most clearly depicts” (SC, 212, Note 68). In other words, according to this interpretation, there was a moral intention to The Prince, that of denouncing the abuses and cruelties of rulers. It is an interpretation which Foscolo accepted and even repeated in a famous passage of Dei Sepolcri.²⁷ It is an interpretation that calls for a reading of the intentions of Machiavelli. It also denies the scientific quality of The Prince, that is, the independence of Machiavelli's political judgment from all other constraints or values which might have interfered with the purely political behaviour of man. This view, which is the one which has established Machiavelli as the father of modern political science, requires that politics is a science and, as such, free from religious or moral beliefs. Otherwise it would be like tempering any scientific activity by the moral or religious beliefs of the individual. But Rousseau's interpretation, by placing a moral intention at the root of The Prince, would exclude its scientific validity.

At any rate, even admitting that Rousseau's interpretation can be one interpretation of The Prince, it tells us more about Rousseau's way of thinking than Machiavelli's. In fact in Chapter III, Of the Rights of the Strongest, Rousseau places his political doctrine firmly on moral grounds: “Let us agree, then, that might does not make right, and that we are obligated to obey only legitimate powers” (SC, 19, 7). Clearly for “legitimate” here Rousseau means not only duly elected, but “morally sound.” In other words morality for Rousseau is an absolute. And any reader of Machiavelli knows how much this author believed that morality was a relative value. But this view reveals to us a process of thinking typical of Rousseau. In fact, in the aforementioned apologetic note on Machiavelli, Rousseau refers to his choice of Cesare Borgia as a proof in itself of his real intentions: “The mere choice of his execrable hero sufficiently manifests his secret intention.” The key words here are execrable hero and secret intention.

At the very beginning of the Social Contract Rousseau states the subject of his work: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (SC, 5, 4). He also proclaims the need for man to recover his original freedom: “If I considered only force and the results that proceed from it, I should say that so long as a People is compelled to obey and does obey, it does well; but that, so soon as it can shake off the yoke and does shake it off, it does better; for, recovering its liberty by the same right by which it was taken away, either it is justified in resuming it, or there was no justification for depriving them of it” (SC, 6, 4). The first statement is not a scientific one. It is the affirmation of a moral value: freedom. The second is only a consequence of the first. No government has the right to deprive a man of his freedom. This free man can exist only in an ideal state of nature, if this ever existed. But whether it ever existed or not, Rousseau has made a choice, based not on scientific evidence, but on moral grounds. Freedom is sacred. The rest is only a consequence of this firm belief. We noted the key words with which Rousseau states the real intention of Machiavelli. This author's long-standing opposition to Christianity was a precious source for Rousseau who believed that Christianity had destroyed temporal citizenship by proclaiming that the City of God had absolute precedence over the City of Man. Rousseau's criticism occurs in Chapter VIII, Of Civil Religion, where the author acknowledges that at the height of the Roman Empire, when Paganism had come to represent one religion, Jesus established

upon the earth a Spiritual Kingdom; this, separating the theological from the political system, ended the unity of the State, and caused the internal divisions which have never ceased to agitate Christian peoples. For as this new idea of a kingdom in another world was unable to enter into the heads of pagans, they always regarded the Christians as true rebels who, under a hypocritical submission, only sought the moment to render themselves independent and masters, and to adroitly usurp the authority they pretend to respect in their weakness. Such was the cause of the persecutions. [417] What the pagans feared has happened; then everything changed its appearance, the humble Christians changed their language, and soon one saw this pretended kingdom of the other world become under a visible chief the most violent despotism in this world

(SC, 416-417, 126).

Concerning the harm done by Christianity to the state Rousseau leaves no doubts: “Christian law is more injurious than useful to a firm constitution of the State” (SC, 422, 128). And he concludes that Christians know better how to die than to conquer: “True Christians are made to be slaves … when the cross had driven out the eagle, all Roman valour disappeared” (436-438, 132). It is evident that these paragraphs of Rousseau's Social Contract were inspired by Machiavelli.²⁸

In order to legitimize his source, Rousseau had to find a common moral ground and he did this by revealing the “secret intention” of Machiavelli to denounce the shameless rules of the game of power by choosing an “execrable hero” in order to carry out his fictitious plot. Although not very convincing, this approach allows for a consistent use and reference to Machiavelli on key issues, such as his view on Christianity and the Catholic Church, his choice of the Roman model of civic awareness and loyalty to the State, and his supposed republicanism.

However, this is by no means the only reason for the “allegorical” interpretation of Machiavelli on the part of Rousseau. In Machiavelli there are two main positions: that explicitly declared in the Preface of the Discourses on Titus Livy, and that of The Prince. In the first, the author states that the study of Roman history through the work of Titus Livy can be a lesson for the youth and a model for their political conduct. In The Prince Machiavelli states that the successful ruler must imitate the actions of Cesare Borgia.²⁹ In the Preface of the Discourses Machiavelli flatly denies any change in the course of history, at the very same time that the works of Peter Martyr and other early chroniclers of the discovery of the New World had proclaimed a new beginning for the history of the world. Instead Machiavelli rejects this “modernist” view. This decisive passage is the one in which Machiavelli demonstrates his conviction that human things never change and therefore it is necessary to imitate those who best succeeded in politics in the past, that is, the Romans. With an oblique but obvious reference to the recent geographical discoveries, Machiavelli observes that men no longer imitate the ancients because they judge that “the sky, the sun, the natural elements, men, have changed their movements, their order and their power from what they were in ancient times” (Discourse, op. cit., p. 124). But this is a mistake, says Machiavelli, and one which needs to be remedied: “With the intention of correcting this error from the mind of men, I have judged it necessary to write on the works of Titus Livy … a commentary containing what I believe is necessary in order to understand them according to the knowledge of ancient and modern things, so that those who will read my comments will be able to see how useful it is to know history” (Discourses, op. cit., pp. 124-125). Therefore, in Machiavelli, the history of Rome becomes a superior ideal, a fixed term of comparison to which the politician must aspire in order to approximate this ideal, even if he knows that he can never achieve it. Therefore in Machiavelli the ideal of Rome has all the characteristics of the Platonic idea of the ideal city.

When Rousseau proclaimed the authority of Machiavelli he thought of this secret ideal which spurred the writings of the Florentine historian, regardless of the “execrable hero” he had chosen for the model of The Prince. But the same can be said of Rousseau's noble savage. It is an ideal which probably never existed and which is unattainable. However, it embodies all the intuitions of Rousseau on the true value of freedom and of the means to ensure its survival in the modern world. Rousseau's process of allegorization can be seen gradually taking shape in the Discourse on Inequality and culminating in Emile.

The allegorical genre is traditionally linked to Medieval authors, most commonly Dante, mainly because he himself states on at least two occasions an allegorical reading of his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy.³⁰ Classical authors as well as Renaissance authors have also been interpreted allegorically.³¹ In his comprehensive survey on the allegoric genre, Angus Fletcher has stated first that “Allegory is a protean device, omnipresent in Western literature from the earliest times to the modern era,”³² and, second, that there is no work which can be defined as purely allegorical: “All literature, as Northrop Frye has observed, is from the point of view of commentary more or less allegorical, while no ‘pure allegory’ will ever be found. There is therefore no harm in drawing instances from borderline cases. Even the Divine Comedy, which most readers would assume to be the greatest Western example of allegory, seemed, to Coleridge, and has more recently been shown by Auerbach, to be a quasi-allegorical work.”³³ Stretching his theory on the allegoric genre to its conclusion Fletcher gives an example of the allegorical relationship between the theme and the image, in the naturalist or realistic novel. Since allegory “is never present as a pure modality” (p. 312), there are “degrees of allegorical intention” (p. 314). Therefore, according to Fletcher, even the naturalist novel can be interpreted as allegorical, because its heroes are simplified and must fall into a predetermined line of action; they are not free to choose. The theme in this genre dominates the images: “The total effect of the usual naturalist novel is to suggest that powerful thematic conceptions govern the action” (p. 315).³⁴ Fletcher's defintion of allegory as that which “says one thing and means another,” suits quite nicely not only Rousseau's interpretation of Machiavelli's Prince, but justifies my own allegorical reading of Rousseau, for whom, as we have seen, man in the state of nature might never have existed.

THE REFERENTIAL ALLEGORY

The consensus of the critics of Rousseau is that there is a cogent and close relationship between the Discours on Inequality (DI), the Social Contract (SC) and Emile (E).³⁵ On the other hand the state of nature extolled in DI would seem to contradict both the citizen of SC and the pupil of E, since education and legislation are the opposite of the state of nature.³⁶

Let us now examine the pieces of the puzzle:

• 1) The statement on the probable fictitiousness of the state of nature in DI.
• 2) The “allegorical” interpretation of Machiavelli.
• 3) The contradiction between the state of nature (DI) on the one hand and education (E) and legislation (SC) on the other.

At the centre of Rousseau's opus is the search for that lost oneness of men, which he equated with freedom, to erase that dichotomy which he blamed on Christianity, and reestablish the unity within the conscience of the free citizen. This was his innermost and constant dream. This is where allegory plays a key role. Rousseau speaks of a primitive man, but he tells us that that age is gone for ever. At every point we are confronted with the contrast between our corrupt society and the good examples of primitive men. It would seem that, given this assessment, the noble savage is only a momentary survivor in far-away places, and he also is destined to disappear. The only remedy is a new educational system, supported by an adequate doctrine which will enable the right tutor to instruct the right disciple so that the primitive noble savage within every child can be brought forth and given supremacy over society's old conventions and habits which do nothing, but perpetuate a state of decadence. A passage from the Essay on the Origin of Languages (EL) will illustrate the complexity of this allegorical mode in Rousseau. The passage is in Chapter XIX, How Music has Degenerated, and deals with the example given by Rousseau of the decadence of music after it separated from poetry. Rousseau argues that this was aggravated by the Barbaric invasions:

Finally came the catastrophe that disrupted the progress of the human spirit without removing the faults that were its product. Europe, flooded with barbarians, enslaved by ignoramuses, lost at the same time her sciences, her arts, and that universal instrument of both: that is, harmoniously perfected language. Imperceptibly, every ear became accustomed to the rude voices of these coarse men engendered by the North. Their harsh, expressionless voices were noisy without being sonorous. … Thus we see how singing gradually became an art entirely separate from speech, from which it takes its origin; how the harmonics of sound resulted in forgetting vocal inflections; and finally, how music, restricted to purely physical concurrences of vibrations, found itself deprived of the moral power it has yielded when it was the twofold voice of nature.³⁷

This is the same barbarian characterized in Chapter IX, Formation of the Southern Languages, as “brutish,” “the most robust,” who “would want to live only on fruits and hunting. Thus they became blood-thirsty hunters and despoilers; or, with time, warriors, conquerors, usurpers. History is tainted with the memories of such crimes by these early kings” (EL, 36).

In other words, on every occasion, Rousseau is painting a picture in which the savage, far from being noble, is at the center of violence, greed and passions, his murderous instincts out of control in the wild. But this barbarian is already a degenerate barbarian. The noble barbarian, or noble savage, is the one which might never have existed, the one who would have lived with his immediate family, far away from other men, for whom Rousseau depicts this idyllic setting: “These barbaric times were a golden age, not because men were united but because they were separated. … If you wish, men would attack each other when they met, but they rarely met. A state of war prevailed universally, and the entire earth was at peace” (EL, 33). And now and again we see this contrast between the real barbarian, a brutish, quarrelsome ape-like creature, and an ideal savage, whose existence is attested to only by Rousseau, since it is the result of an act of faith and not a scientific observation.

The same “allegory” can be seen in the other three works which have been considered a kind of trilogy: DI, SC, and E.

The subject matter of DI is introduced by the author with a paradox. His purpose, says Rousseau, is to identify how it came about that, “with right succeeding violence, nature was subjected to the law; to explain by what sequence of prodigious events the strong could resolve to serve the weak” (DI, 77). Here too Rousseau's method is eminently allegorical because this statement presupposed a general ideology which can legitimize it. Again we can identify key words: strong and weak. Only a reader already familiar with the doctrine of the eighteenth-century philosophers would assure that the strong here are the people, the vast majority of men, who have surrended their freedom to their rulers, the few, therefore the weak. This unjustifiable condition of inequality that the strong be enslaved by the weak, is further explained by the abandonment of the state of nature in which man was strong and master of his own environment. Once he has abandoned that state of nature man has also lost the qualities which made him master of his destiny: “in becoming sociable and a slave, he grows feeble, timid, servile; and his soft and effeminate way of life completes the enervation of both his strength and his courage” (DI, 86). But man has a unique faculty, which no other animal possesses: the faculty of self-improvement. This faculty, says Rousseau, not only differentiates us from the heroes, but “with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties” (DI, 88). These faculties, among which the principal and most important is that of language, will make man realize that, in order to develop his potential, he needs to live in society with other men. Thus the need for private property, laws, governments, etc. At the same time, these creations of men increase his needs. In the state of nature man has few needs, therefore he conceives no passions. Contrarily to Hobbes, Rousseau believes that man is not naturally evil. On the contrary, it is in society that man becomes evil, because in the state of nature “they had not the least idea of meum and tuum.”³⁸

It is therefore an incontestable fact that it is only in society that even love, together with all the other passions, has acquired that impetuous ardour which so often renders it fatal to men: and it is all the more ridiculous to depict savages endlessly killing each other to satisfy their brutality, since this image is directly contrary to experience

(DI, 103).³⁹

Here again we note a keyword, experience. Whose experience? Certainly not Rousseau's, since he never went to the New World in order to verify his theories. The experience to which Rousseau is referring is that of the Caribbean Indians as narrated in the travel literature of the day. It is another commonplace, but in the hands of Rousseau it becomes building material for the erection of the revolutionary symbol.

Rousseau claims that the ideal state of nature is not to be found anywhere, since most savage peoples known to us are blood-thirsty and cruel:

and it is for lack of having sufficiently distinguished between different ideas and seen how far those people already are from the first state of nature that so many authors have hastened to conclude that man is naturally cruel and needs civil institutions to make him peaceable, whereas in truth nothing is more peaceable than man in his primitive state; placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civilized man

(DI, 114-115).

Therefore Rousseau's likeness of the noble savage is an allegorical one. It can hardly be found on this earth, and cannot be a subject of empirical evidence; nevertheless it is real, as real as Dante's equation of Beatrice with Faith and Theology.

Rousseau's conclusion to DI anticipates the main thesis of the SC: man in the state of nature is happy, but for some “fatal accident, which, for the common good, ought never to have happened” (DI, 115), he left that state to allow “the origin of society and of laws, which put new fetters on the weak and gave new powers to the rich, which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established for all time the law of property and inequality, transformed adroit usurpation into irrevocable right, and for the benefit of a few ambitious men subjected the human race thenceforth to labour, servitude and misery” (DI, 122). This is the ideological utilization of the allegory. Even though men in the ideal state no longer exist this should not stop the philosopher from searching and finding the truth about that primordial model. Rousseau claims that, not only has he found the primordial model, which we can define as “referential allegory,” but that the history of mankind is a tragic mistake, a betrayal of that original primitive state. Gradually, Rousseau's allegory alluded to a story which had strong analogies with the biblical story of the lost Terrestrial Paradise. Even if this analogy was not explicit, it had implicit connotations which conjured two types of reminiscences, both of which were adjustable to this new allegoric mode: 1) biblical references which belonged to the cultural background of every average reader, and 2) the tradition of the early chroniclers from Columbus to Las Casas in which the American Indian was presented as the “pre-Adamite” model free from original sin, the surviving inhabitant of the Terrestrial Paradise.⁴⁰

The identification of this referential allegory was a real discovery, one which would have profound consequences both for the work of Rousseau and for his lasting influence on modern thought.

At the core of his success is his unshakable faith in his discovery. Even if its content is not always clear in his own mind, its truth is. He has described this state of mind in his Fragment Biographique:

almost transported above myself by the sublimity of my subject, I was like those lawyers, more famous than eloquent, whom we consider great orators because they defend great causes, or rather like those evangelical preachers who preach without style but convincingly because they themselves are convinced. What makes most modern books so cold with so much wit, is that the authors do not believe anything of what they say and do not bother having the readers believe it. They want to impress, rather than convince the readers.⁴¹

In his Confessions, Rousseau attaches great importance to his “discoveries.” At the end of Book VI of the “Première Partie,” he recounts his obsession to leave for Paris in order to present to the Academy his new “système de musique”: “From that moment I believed that my fortune was made and in my desire to share it with the one to whom I owed everything, I could not think of anything else but to leave for Paris, without doubting for a moment that from the moment I presented my project to the Academy I would start a Revolution.”⁴²

The moment of discovery of the “referential allegory” is registered in another passage of the Confessions, that in which Rousseau recalls his walks through the woods of St. Germain, while meditating on the subject of the Discourse on Inequality:

The rest of the day, wandering in the thick of the woods, I looked for and I found there the picture of the primitive times, the story of which I sketched fearlessly. I brushed aside all the little lies of men, I unveiled the naked truth of their nature, I followed the progression of times and of the facts which have corrupted them, and comparing the man made by men with that natural man, I showed them that in their pretended progress lies the source of all their miseries.⁴³

The key words here are image des premiers temps and l'homme naturel: “the picture of primitive times” and “natural man.” What is Rousseau's source of information? Nature itself and the author's own thoughts, his memories, his associations and impressions. From this undeniable subjective experience the referential allegory of the noble savage was born. This is the discovery of DI. However Rousseau realizes that without law or without education man cannot survive, without plunging again into a state of permanent violence where only the strongest and most ambitious will survive. This need acquires theoretical form in the Social Contract and Emile, two works which are closely related not only because of their date of composition, 1762, but because they provide the solution to the apparent contradiction between the noble savage and civilized society. In fact, once the need for law and order is established, the only solution is to educate that primitive man so that he can grow to the full development of his faculties. This is the subject of Emile. Furthermore, such a man, once educated, will become the ideal citizen for the ideal republic. This is the subject of the Social Contract. Rousseau, himself, in his Confessions, has stated the moralistic and didactic purpose of his writings, identifying the common inspiration that shaped his books. He says that he did not write in order to make a living, but in order to tell the truth: “But I felt that to write just to make a living would have destroyed my spirit and killed my talent which rested less in my pen than in my heart, and was born for elevated and fearless thoughts, the only ones which could nourish it.”⁴⁴ He felt that it was his duty to tell the truth regardless of its popularity: “In order to be able and to dare to declare fundamental truths one cannot depend on their success. I left my books with the public with the certitude of having spoken for the common good, without any further preoccupation for anything else.”⁴⁵

The fundamental political nature of all his works is clear when the author himself acknowledges that the preoccupation for the best form of government was paramount in the composition of all his works:

I had seen that everything is profoundly rooted in politics … so the great question of the best possible form of government seemed to me that which could be reduce to the following: what is the nature of a government which is the most apt to the most virtous people, the most cultured people, the wisest people, in short the best, giving to this word its widest possible meaning? … What is the government that because of its nature is always the one closest to the law? And from this, one other question: what is the law?⁴⁶

He saw a close relationship between his works: “Whatever daring thoughts are in the Social Contract they were already in the Discourse on Inequality: whatever daring thoughts are in the Emile they were already in Julie [of La Nouvelle Héloïse].”⁴⁷

FROM COMMONPLACE TO REVOLUTIONARY SYMBOL

The task of transforming commonplaces into a revolutionary doctrine fell upon Rousseau. After studying the sources of the travel literature in Rousseau's Discours sur l'inégalité, Chinard concludes that his success was due to his lack of originality, to the fact that, by following up a description of the savages of the Caribbean islands, he had given a false image of primitive man, but one which most people were ready to believe: “The success of Jean-Jacques is due precisely to the lack of originality of his ideas; he encouraged the tendencies of his time, by making for the first time a synthesis and presenting it to the public, in a passionate and apparently logic style, of what the voyagers had felt without ever saying it, after two centuries.”⁴⁸

This is only a half truth. It is true that Rousseau owed most of the news concerning primitive man to the literature of the voyagers and that he was particularly impressed by the accounts of the naked inhabitants of the islands in the West Indies, first described by Columbus and Peter Martyr and then repeated, enlarged and commented upon, by scores of chroniclers for over two centuries. But it is not true that he limited himself to creating a portrait of a primitive man, regardless of its accuracy. His originality is not in the accuracy of his evocation, but in the precision and depth of his symbol. Rousseau understood for the first time what value the noble savage might have for a decadent world, tired of having to tell itself how reasonable it was and how civilized it was and how much progress was being accomplished without superstitions, religion and with so much libertinism. In fact Chinard himself admits that Rousseau was read primarily by mundane readers, people tired of their society “extrémement civilisée.”⁴⁹

Rousseau's influence on modern theories on education must be traced to the psychological nature of his discovery. In the Preface to Emile, Rousseau says that his book's subject matter is good education for the child, whom he presents as a “little man,” as Montessori will, almost two centuries later: “We do not know infancy: on the false ideas we have of it, the more we insist, the further away we find ourselves from it. The wisest are still interested in what matters for grown-ups to learn, without realizing that the infants are already capable of learning. They are always looking for the grown-up in the child, without thinking of what he is before becoming a grown-up. This is the study which I intend to carry on.”⁵⁰ The key words here are “ce qu'il est avant que d'être homme,” which state not only an obvious biological fact, but also direct our attention to the mysterious age before reason. Like his research on primitive man, Rousseau's referential allegory is clearly a functional concept, clearly stated in this other passage, which anticipates the essence of Montessori's theory and the basic assumption of the Absorbent Mind,⁵¹ concerning the learning ability of the child in his first few years of life: “I repeat, man's education begins at his birth; before he speaks, before he understands, he already learns. His experience anticipates the teaching; at the time he meets his nanny, he has already absorbed quite a lot … but we do not think of the general knowledge because this is assimilated without thinking and even before the age of reason.”⁵²

In order to raise a commonplace to the status of revolutionary symbol Rousseau invented a natural tension between this commonplace, familiar to every reader in Europe, and its opposite, the citizen, while pretending to oppose the bourgeois. That citizen, who is the educated noble savage, is an original creation of Rousseau, because he came to symbolize freedom, as in the Middle Ages Beatrice came to symbolize love. We have seen how the concept of allegory can be interpreted in different ways.

Many troubadours and poets in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries treated the theme of love, choosing as their inspiration a “donna angelicata.” Their metaphors enriched the doctrine of courtly love, especially in the poets of the Dolce Stil Nuovo. But only one poet singled out one lady to be first the revelation of true love, then the guide to his spiritual regeneration/education and, finally, the allegory/spiritual contract of faith and love. Indeed, Beatrice is the inspiration not only of Dante's love poetry, but of the allegorization and doctrinal structure underlying his poetic synthesis. In this he expressed the highest aspiration of medieval man and offered an unsurpassed model for Christian poetry for centuries to come.

On the other hand, Rousseau's idea that civilization can become culture when it is motivated and organized by sublimated sex as expressed in Emile could be a layman's view of Dante's interpretation of divine love, circumscribed to the world of men, leaving the universe, religion and metaphysical or mystical visions out of the real world of politics. Rousseau places great emphasis on unsatisfied sexual desire, mixed with imagination and “amour propre,” which produces a tremendous psychic energy that can be used for the greatest deeds and thoughts. And also, delayed satisfaction is, according to him, the condition of idealism and love, and early satisfaction causes the whole structure to collapse and flatten.⁵³ One can see how Dante's doctrine of love might have provided some inspiring structural patterns if one excludes the Christian God as its ultimate aim and substitutes Rousseau's sense of citizenship and social duties: from the awareness of an angelic woman, through the learning of theology up to the ultimate peace and happiness of Paradise which corresponds to the awareness of the noble savage in every child, through the learning of the potentiality of sex (as Jean-Jacques had learned about God from the Savoyard Vicar when he was young and corrupt and had risked that dualism between body and soul) with Sophie playing the part of a worldly Beatrice to achieve that unity of conscience which will ultimately lead to the blessing of God and a reward on earth. Ideals of beauty and virtue incarnated in Sophie prepare the movement from nature to society; the ideal family unit is thus kept intact from alien motives such as fear, vanity or coercion. The main purpose of education is to prepare man and woman for one another for what has been properly called the sexual contract, when there is no curse of original sin or sexual desire. The ideal family is ready for the social contract, the most comprehensive human order, civil society, where each individual is intellectually and morally free from physical and moral tyranny.

The noble savage of Rousseau is not only the motif of a fashionable debate between nature and society, but he becomes the symbol of a new man. If, in the Discourse on Inequality, the noble savage is the revelation of the ancestor of mankind, free from social conventions, in the Social Contract he becomes the free man who is willing, by his own choice, to unite with the other members of his species in order to found a community and accept legislation in the name of the common good. From his natural state to his social state the noble savage has retained and enhanced his freedom, protected now by the law. Finally, in Emile the symbol of the noble savage serves to conceive the ideal child, the ideal disciple and, therefore, the ideal citizen. From noble savage to ideal citizen Rousseau has consecrated that religion of freedom which undoubtedly constitutes the most important accomplishment of modern man. That is why in the period which has elapsed between Dante and Rousseau we can safely say that “Catholic,” universal, medieval, Christian love has been replaced by the universal modern love of freedom, which may, and it does in fact, include an individual's adherence to a given religion, faith or sect. That is why Rousseau is one of a handful of authors who, while belonging to a very definite period of history, have a universal interest for all men who love freedom: physical freedom as opposed to slavery and tyranny, moral freedom as opposed to religious discrimination or superstition.

Notes

1. “L'antiquité avait eu l'Age d'or, le moyen âge le Paradis Terrestre; à un moment ou les legends antiques sont mortes, ou la religion est en butte aux attaques de l'esprit de libre examen, vient se substituer un ideal plus actuel, si je ouis dire, et en tout cas contemporain mais exotique. Le bon indien va paraître reunir en lui toutes les vertus antiques et chrétiennes, c'est de l'Amérique et des Isles que l'on va rever et c'est des récits de voyages que proviennent directement toutes les utopies qui abondent avant Rousseau, et dont Rousseau s'inspire. … L'apogée de ce mouvement est marqué par le Discours sur l'inégalité, résultat de deux siècles et demi de discussions, de révoltes et de rêves utopiques.” Cf. Gilbert Chinard, L'Amérique et le rêve exotique, Paris, Librairie E. Droz, 1934, p. vii. The English translations from this and all subsequent passages from the French original are my own.

2. “Il ne provenait pas, du gout que prennent les spectateurs pour le sens et la simplicité de ce personnage et qu'un seul d'entre eux voulut pour cela lui ressembler. C'est tout au contraire que cette piece favorise leur tour d'esprit, qui est de rechercher et d'aimer les idées neuves et singulières; or il n'y eu a pas pour eux de plus neuves que celles de la nature.” Quoted by Chinard, op. cit., pp. 230-231.

3. “[I]l est à peu près certain, cependant, qu'il n'aurait pas rencontré parmi ses lecteurs un tel accueil si ces derniers n'avaient pas déjà été quelque peu familiarisés avec ‘ces idées neuves et singulières’.” Chinard, op. cit., p. 231.

4. “Comme il y va! / Comme il detale! / Quel chasseur que ce Huron-la! / Il faut le voir dans ces valons: / Il a des ailes aux talons. / Il tire a bale. / Pan, pan, pan, il tue a tous coup / Les pauvres lievres en son tous / comme des fous / Feinte ni ruse / rien ne l'abuse: / Il fait leurs tours / Et leurs detours. / Ah quel coureur! / Il vous les lasse / Ah quel tireur! / Pan, pan, pan, il tue à tous corps. / Tout d'une haleine / Il court la plaine, / Sans être jamais las. / Si celui la n'est pas alerte, / certe, / Je ne m'y connois pas. / A la course, au vol, à cent pas. / Il tire, et la pièce est à bas. / Comme il y va, etc.” Jean-François Marmontel, Le Huron, Paris, Chez Merlin, 1768, Act I, Scene II, pp. 5-6. All references are to this edition. The English translations from this and all subsequent passages from the French original are my own.

5. “Il faut avoir le coeur, pour obtenir la main.” Act I, Scene II, p. 8.

6. “A mon age un Huron se suffit à lui-même; / Et, grace à la nature, il ne me manque rien.” Act I, Scene III, p. 11.

7. “Si vous saviez combien votre sexe est docile. / Et combien par l'amour le notre est adouci' / Ah! Si dans no forets, où regne la nature, / J'avois pu rencontrer ce que je trouve ici, / J'y serois encor, je vous jure.” Act I, Scene III, p. 11.

8. “C'est vous, cruels vous et vos lois, / C'est vous qu'on doit nommer sauvages.” Act II, Scene XIII, p. 41.

9. “L'Américain farouche est un monstre sauvage / Qui mord en frémissant le joug de l'esclavage. / Soumi au chatiment, fier dans l'impunité, / De la main qui le flatte il se croit redouté.” Alzire où Les Americains, Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire, Conforme pour le texte à l'édition de Beuchot, Théatre, II, Paris, Garnier, 1877, Act I, Scene I, p. 387. The English translations from this and all subsequent passages from the French original are my own.

10. “L'Américain farouche en sa simplicité / Nous égale en courage et nous passe en bonté.” Act I, Scene I, p. 388:

11. “Montèze, Américains qui fûtes mes victimes, / Songez que ma clémence a surpassé mes crimes. / Instruisez l'Amérique; apprenez à ses rois / Que les chrétiens sont nés pour leur donner des lois / (A Zamore) Des Dieux que nous servons connais la différence. / Les tiens t'ont commandé le meurtre et la vengeance; / Et le mien, quand ton bras vient de m'assassiner, / M'ordonne de te plaindre et de te pardonner.” Act V, Scene VII, p. 434.

12. “Les sauvage du Nouveau Gulliver et Arlequin sauvage de Deslisle sont des examples de l'homme de la nature qui, moins raffiné que l'Europeen, vaut mieux que lui et, par sa simplicité et son bon sens, triomphe de ses raisonnements, tout en critiquant sans pitie la société, ses lois et ses usages. En dehors de ces oeuvres pourtant, nous avons déjà une litterature assez considerable qui se plait à opposer le sauvage à l'homme civilisé et ses simples vertus à nos vices compliqués” (Le socialisme au XVIIIe siècle, op. cit., p. 53). The English translation from the French original is my own.

13. See for the chronicles of America and the libertines of the seventeenth century, G. Atkinson, Les relations des voyages du XVIIe siècle, New York, Burt Franklin, 1971, p. 22.

14. “C'est en quelque sort, l'état de nature mis en opposition avec l'état de l'homme artificiel, tel qu'il l'est dans les grandes villes,” quoted in Jacques Van den Heuvel, Voltaire dans ses contes, Paris, Librairie Armand Colin, 1967, p. 297. The English translations from this and all subsequent passages from the French original are my own.

15. Van den Heuvel asks: “S'agit-il d'une attaque contre les idées de Rousseau ou contre les méfaits du christianisme en général, ou contre les menées des jesuites, ou contre les parlements jansenistes?” op. cit., p. 297.

16. Le bachelier: “Monsieur le sauvage, vous avez vu sans doute beaucoup de vos camarades qui passent leur vie tout seuls: car on dit que c'est la la veritable vie de l'homme, et que la société n'est qu'une dépravation artificielle,” in Voltaire, Dialogues et Anecdotes philosophiques, Introduction, notes et rapprochements par Raymond Naves, Paris, Garnier, 1966, p. 95. The English translations from this and all subsequent passages from the French original are my own.

17. “[I]l me parait que tout ce qui nous fait plaisir sans faire tort à personne est très bon et très juste; que ce qui fait tort aux hommes sans nous faire de plaisir est abominable; et que ce qui nous fait plaisir en faisant du tort aux autres est bon pour nous dans le moment, très dangereux pour nous-mesmes, et très mauvais pour autrui,” Dialogues et Anecdotes philosophiques, op. cit., pp. 98-99.

18. “[E]n Angleterre on laissait vivre les gens à leur fantaisier,” Voltaire, Ingénu, Romans et Contes, ed. Henri Bénac, Paris, Garnier, 1960, p. 227.

19. “[L]e loi positive devait avoir tout l'avantage, et que sans le conventions faites entre les hommes, la loi de nature ne serait presque jamais qu'un brigandage naturel,” Ingénu, op. cit., p. 240.

20. “Vous êtes donc de bien malhonnêtes gens, puisqu'il faut entre vous tant de précautions,” Ingénu, op. cit., p. 240.

21. “Combien d'honnêtes gens dans le monde ont pu dire: malheur n'est bon à rien!,” Ingénu, op. cit., p. 283.

22. The Portable Voltaire, with a Critical Introduction and Notes by Ben Ray Redman, New York, The Viking Press, 1960, p. 41.

23. Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Maurice Cranston, Penguin Books, 1984, p. 131. All references to this edition will be given with page numbers in parenthesis in the body of the text.

24. “Qui n'existe plus, qui n'a peut-être point existé, qui probablement n'existera jamais, et dont il est pourtant nécessaire d'avoir des Notions justes pour bien juger de notre état présent.” Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, Dijon, Bibliothèque La Pléiade, 1966, Vol. III, p. 123. The English translations from this and all subsequent passages from the French original are my own. Scholarship has dealt at length with Rousseau's motivations in writing this sentence and a consensus has arisen that it was dictated by the overriding fears of the Church, which was very sensitive in matters of theories on the origins of the world which did not conform to the account in Genesis. (Cf. Jean Morel, “Recherches sur les sources du discours de l'inégalité,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Geneva, A. Jullien, 1909, N. 5, p. 135; George R. Havens, “Diderot, Rousseau, and the Discours sur l'Inegalité,” in Otis Fellows and Gita May, eds., Diderot Studies, Geneva, Librairie Droz, 1961, N. 3, p. 261; Marc F. Plattner, “The Historical Status of the State of Nature,” Rousseau's State of Nature, op. cit., pp. 17-30.)

25. 115, 39-40. All quotes are taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract, A new translation, with an introduction and annotations, by Charles M. Sherover, New York, Harper and Row, 1984. From now on references are given in the body of the text with the abbreviation SC, paragraph and page number of this edition.

26. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Translated by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa. With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Bondanella, New York, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 56.

27. Contemplating Machiavelli's tomb in Santa Croce Foscolo says: “Io quando il monumento / vidi ove posa il corpo di quel grande, / che temprando lo scettro a' regnatori, / gli allor ne sfronda, ed alle genti svela / di che lacrime gronde e di che sangue”; verses 154-158 (“When I saw the monument / where the body rests of that great man, / who, seeming to temper the sceptre of the rulers / showed the people how stained it was by tears and blood”).

28. Machiavelli clearly states the superiority of Paganism over Christianity in this passage taken from his Discourses on Titus Livy: “Ancient religion, besides this, only beatified men full of worldly glory; such as leaders of the army or rulers of states. Our religion has glorified more contemplative than active men. … And if our religion requires fortitude from you, it desires of you the willingness to become the object of a strong action rather than be the actor. This kind of life seems to have made the world weak and delivered it into the hands of shameless men who, seeing how the vast majority in order to go to Heaven is more concerned to take a beating than to avenge it, can do what they want.” Cf. Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe e Discorsi, con introduzione di Giuliano Procacci e a cura di Sergio Bertelli Milano, Feltrinelli Editore, Classici Italiani, Universale Economica, 1973, 320-321, Discorsi II, ii, 282-283. The English translation is my own.

29. In Chapter VII of The Prince, On New Principalities Acquired with the Arms of Others and by Fortune, Machiavelli twice states that Cesare Borgia's actions and behaviour ought to be imitated. At the beginning of the account of Borgia's conquest of Romagna, during which he first ordered his lieutenant Remirro de Orco to slay the heads of the prominent families in Rimini and then, in order to shift the blame for this bloody action on to him, had him cut to pieces and his body placed on display on the public square for all Rimini to look upon and despise, Machiavelli states: “And because this matter is notable and worthy of imitation by others, I shall not pass it over” (The Prince, op. cit., p. 26). And in the concluding passages of this episode Machiavelli reaffirms his intention of proposing Cesare Borgia as a model: “Now, having summarized all of the Duke's actions, I would not know how to censure him; on the contrary, I believe I am correct in proposing that he be imitated by all those who have risen to power through fortune and with the arms of others” (The Prince, op. cit., p. 28).

30. The two references to allegory can be found in Convivio and the Letter to Cangrande della Scala; in Convivio II, 1, 2-6, Dante explains the difference between the allegory of the poets and that of the theologians, and states that he will follow the first. In the Letter Dante explains that the meaning of the Divine Comedy, is multiple: literal, allegoric, moral and anagogic. There have been diverging opinions on the interpretation of the allegory in Dante. For the quotes from Dante I have used Tutte le Opere di Dante, ed. Fredi Chiappelli, Milan, Mursia, 1965, pp. 512-514; 861-863.

31. Homer's allegories were a subject of study in ancient times. The Allegories of Homer were composed in Greek by an author who was probably called Heraclitus and who probably lived in the first century A.D. For a detailed discussion see Héraclite, Allégories d'Homère, Texte établi et traduit par Félix Buffière, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1962, VII-LIX. This work is a defense of the allegories of the gods composed by Homer in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, allegories which Heraclitus believed had been misunderstood by all those who had accused Homer of not having sufficient respect for the gods. This allegorical interpretation of Homer is only one of its kind which has reached us. For a complete treatment of the allegoric genre, with examples taken from ancient, medieval, renaissance, modern and contemporary works, see Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1975.

32. Allegory, op. cit., p. 1.

33. Allegory, op. cit., pp. 8-10.

34. I am aware that this is only one interpretation of allegory and by no means the only one. But it is the theory which best suits a loose allegorical reading of any author, including those, like Rousseau, who could not traditionally fit into the mould of allegorical works. It would be sufficient to point out the case of Dante. The level of allegorical interpretation achieved by Singleton and his school must be limited to a Catholic-related system of values, so that the literal reading of the text of the Divine Comedy can achieve a story, whereas the allegorical reading teaches the reader through an “exemplum” and fulfils Scriptural prophecies of damnation and salvation. For a different approach to the genre of allegory in a Dantist, see Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante's Commedia, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1969.

35. For the issue of the cogency between Rousseau's works see Stephen Ellenburg, Rousseau's Political Philosophy, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1976.

36. For contrasting views on Rousseau's philosophy see James Miller, Rousseau Dreamer of Democracy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984.

37. Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Language. Translated, with afterwords by John M. Moran and Alexander Gode; Introduction by Alexander Gode; New York, F. Ungar Publishing Co., 1966, pp. 69-72.

38. For the use of these words first in Peter Martyr's De Orbe Novo, see Chapter 1 of this study.

39. To substantiate his thesis Rousseau takes his example from the Caribbean Indians and also follows Peter Martyr's description. For a comment of this passage compared to an analogous one of Oviedo, where the opposite view is held, see Chapter 1 of this study.

40. This relationship between the myth of the noble savage of the early chroniclers of America and the biblical tradition was clearly identified by Mircea Eliade: “The state of innocence, and the spiritual blessedness of man before the fall, in the paradisiac myth, becomes, in the myth of the good savage, the pure, free and happy state of the exemplary man, surrounded by a maternal and generous Nature. But in that image of primordial Nature we can easily recognize the features of a paradisiac landscape”; Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 41.

41. “élevé pour ainsi dire au-dessus de moi-même par la sublimité de mon sujet, j'étais comme ces avocats plus célèbres qu'éloquents qu'on prend pour de grands orateurs parce qu'ils plaident de grandes causes, ou plutôt comme ces prédicateurs évangéliques qui prêchent sans art mais qui touchent parce qu'ils sont touchés. Ce qui rend la plupart des libres modernes si froids avec tant d'esprit, c'est que les auteurs ne croient rien de ce qu'ils disent, et ne se soucient pas même de le faire croire aux autres. Ils veulent briller et non convaincre.” Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, I, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1959, p. 1113. The English translations from this and all subsequent passages from the French original are my own.

42. “Dès ce moment je crus ma fortune faite, et dans l'ardeur de la partager avec celle à qui je devois tout, je ne songeai qu'à partir pour Paris, ne doutant pas qu'en présentant mon projet à l'Académie je ne fisse une révolution.” Les Confessions, op. cit., p. 272.

43. “Tout le reste du jour, enfoncé dans la forêt, j'y cherchois, j'y trouvois l'image des premiers temps dont je traçois fiérement l'histoire; je faisois main basse sur les petits mensonges des hommes, j'osois dévoiler à mid leur nature, suivre le progrès du temps et des choses qui l'ont défigurée, et comparant l'homme de l'homme avec l'homme naturel, leur montrer dans son perfectionnement prétendu la véritable source de ses misères.” Les Confessions, op. cit., 388.

44. “Mais je sensois qu'écrire pour avoir du pain eut bien étouffé mon génie et tué mon talent qui étoit moins dans ma plume que dans mon coeur, et né uniquement d'une façon de penser élevée et fière qui seule pouvoit le nourrir.” Les Confessions, op. cit., p. 402.

45. “Pour pouvoir, pour oser dire de grandes vérités il ne faut pas dépendre de son succès. Je jettois mes livres dans le public avec la certitude d'avoir parlé pour le bien commun, sans aucun souci du reste.” Les Confessions, op. cit., p. 403.

46. “J'avois vu que tout tenoit radicalement à la politique … aussi cette grande question du meilleur gouvernement possible me paroissoit se réduire à celle-ci. Quelle est la nature du gouvernement propre à former un people le plus vertueux, le plus éclairé, le plus sage, le meilleur enfin à prendre ce mot dans son plus grand sens./././. Quel est le gouvernement qui par sa nature se tient toujours le plus près de la loi? De là, qu'est-ce que la loi?” Les Confessions, op. cit., p. 404-405.

47. “Tout ce qu'il y a de hardi dans le Contrat social étoit auparavant dans le Discours sur l'inégalité; tout ce qu'il y a de hardi dans l'Emile étoit auparavant dans la Julie [of La Nouvelle Héloïse].” Les Confessions, op. cit., p. 407.

48. “Le succès de Jean-Jacques provient précisément du manque d'originalité de ses idées; il flattait les tendances de son temps, il résumait et présentait pour la première fois au public, sous une forme passionnée et en apparence logique, ce que tant de voyageurs avaient senti, sans toujours pouvoir le dire, depuis deux siècles.” L'Amérique et le rêve, op. cit, p. 358. More recently Geoffrey Symcox has insisted on the commonplace, shared in his opinion by Rousseau himself, in “The Wild Man's Return: The Enclosed Vision of Rousseau's Discourses,” in The Wild Man Within, op. cit., pp. 223-247.

49. L'Amérique et le rêve, op. cit, p. 359. More recently, G. Pire in his study on “J.J. Rousseau et les relations de voyages,” in Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, juillet-septembre 1956, 56e année, No. 3, pp. 355-378, has pointed out that, although Rousseau read the travellers selectively, ignoring some of the worst vices of the savages and retaining only the good ones, he did try to “retracer l'histoire authentique du passé de la race humaine” (p. 378). However, I cannot agree with René Gonnard who states in his La légende du bon sauvage, Contribution à l'étude des origines du socialisme, that, more than the noble savage, Rousseau's works have retraced the golden age (Paris, Librairie de Médicis, 1946, p. 80).

50. “On ne connaît point l'enfance: sur les fausses idées qu'on en a, plus on va, plus on s'égare. Les plus sages s'attachent à ce qu'il importe aux hommes de savoir, sans considérer que les enfants sont en état d'apprendre. Ils cherchent toujours l'homme dans l'enfant, sans penser à ce qu'il est avant que d'être homme. Voilà l'étude à laquelle je me suis le plus appliquée.” Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Tome I, Classiques Larousse, p. 28. The English translations from this and all subsequent passages from the Fremch original are my own.

51. Cf. Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, translated by C.A. Claremont, Adyar, Madras, The Theosophical Publishing House, 1961.

52. “Je le répète, l'éducation de l'homme commence à sa naissance; avant de parler, avant que d'entendre, il s'instruit déjà. L'expérience prévient les leçons; au moment qu'il connaît sa nourrice, il a déjà beaucoup acquis. … Mais nous ne songeons guère aux acquisitions générales, parce qu'elles se font sans qu'on y pense et même avant l'âge de raison.” Emile, op. cit., “Libre Premier,” p. 41.

53. Cf. Allan Bloom's “Introduction,” Emile, or On Education, op. cit., pp. 16-17.